Pebbles, Nibbles, Troubbles, And Abbilities

Perhaps I will say a few things. It's not habit forming, they say. And anyway, I can quit anytime I want.

I'll just check in, then I'll be gone. Must exercise some discipline lest I waste my whole day. That won't happen.

Speaking of discipline, I must not eat too much for lunch. That's a terrible thing. Then I get very tired.

But that's a bridge I'll cross when it floats by. Until then, I have this other struggle, my reluctance to get out of this chair.

It doesn't matter, ultimately, if I sit here an extra five minutes. Or maybe it does. If every pebble in a pond changes the earth's course.

I could've spent the last hour reading. I should've. But don't beat yourself up all the time. Good grief. "Could've, would've, should've."

The little pebbles I throw in the pond don't seem to change the earth that much. Maybe I'm not throwing them hard enough.

Technically how big can a pebble be? That might be the problem. I need bigger pebbles.

Boulder-sized pebbles. I could do some real damage with those. Get me one of those medieval catapults, fend off the sheriff and police.

They're going, "We can't stop this guy. He has a year's worth of boulders lined up." What about when he sleeps? "Oh, yeah, that might work."

I must not let it go that far ... I'll just sit here, dangling my feet in the water, playing with this toaster ... throwing pebbles.

The word "nibble" and the word "pebble" are similar. Is there something about "bble" that means small?

If there is, and you have small trouble, it'd be "troubble." But if it's major, leave out a B.

I'm "abble" to do a particular task, but my "abbilities" are limited. I'm "able" to do a particular task if my "abilities" are great.

The more B's you put in, that's the degree that you are "abbbbbbble" or "able" to get the job done.

So a tiny bite when you're fishing is a "nibbbbbbbbble" and a normal one is a "nibble."

A little bit of talk is "babble." Just a nibbling of babbling would need a few more B's.

There's an argument to be made for it.

Dog Poop Conjunctions And Coincidences

I feel I can attract more followers if I do a blessing over my ENTER key before sending every tweet. Bless you, dear words as you go. ENTER.

I faced a strange conjunction -- a dozen different coincidences -- involving my dog, neighbors, their dog, and my dog pooping that second.

If any one little thing had been different -- and there were a thousand variables -- it would've never happened. [Bless you, ENTER key.]

I saw the people coming from a block and a half away but didn't realize they were the neighbors, so I crossed the road, which I never do.

This put them coming from the block down, cutting across, and meeting me right at their corner. My dog pooped, then the dogs tangled.

My dog leash is tangled around the back of the woman's legs, I'm meeting the boyfriend in the dark for the first time. And the poop is lost.

There I am then, with a weak flashlight, and enough poop-colored leaves scattered around, making the perfect camouflage for poop.

The only good thing that came out of it...It's an ice breaker at parties? ...I'm looking at my dog. None of that had to happen. My fault.

I'm like The Who smashing their guitars and drums at the end of a concert. I smash my keyboard every night before bed. I have many new ones.

So here goes my keyboard. Goodnight. sadoi32 DKLJWE[ kk e P;DLGFMSDO kjfds dhp32rnl sfsdklsdk12130rgg3fkf03w2 kaput

Unwrapping Little Caramels

It's time consuming to unwrap these tiny little caramels. I need the discipline to make each one last, so I'm not unwrapping so many.

It's weird that you need to unwrap 100 little caramels to make caramel apples. They need to have one big chunk in plastic wrap instead.

Maybe that's what I should invent: "Grandma's Slump Massive One Chunk, Easy Unwrap Caramels," "Quality from our kitchen ... to your mouth."

Caramels are a dangerous thing to eat, though. Thanks to dental fillings. I keep chomping on them hoping I don't notice anything crunchy.

I remember we used to get some kind of chocolate caramels. But all Walgreens had was some weird brand, "Harvest Faire." Never heard of it.

By the way, it's "Walgreens" without an apostrophe. I was sitting there the other day thinking, That'd be a great bit of trivia to tweet.

Maybe not. It looks less interesting in print that it did in the grand sweeping majesty of the imagination I take with me on the road.

President Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize (Could've Been ME)

I was very happy to hear President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. To be perfectly honest, I didn't even know he was a candidate for it.

This is the way the election in '08 should've gone. Instead of nail biting for two years in advance, just wake up one day and it's over.

Winning the Nobel prize is like an eclipse. Some only happen every 500 years but they don't tell you about it till the day before.

I think one of those 500 year eclipses, they ought to tell you a couple years in advance so you can get a decent telescope.

Am I just supposed to have a fancy telescope in the garage on the off chance that the 500 years is about up?

Anyway. This was two extraordinary pieces of news before I was even awake. The Nobel prize and NASA shooting the moon.

May as well go back to bed. Nothing else can possibly happen.

The moon probe was called something like the CENTAUR 5000. They should have named it the ALICE KRAMDEN 1956.

As in "Pow, ZOOM."

So, congratulations on two fronts. To the Moon for being such a good sport. And to President Obama for skunking everyone else for the prize.

When you're a candidate for the PEACE PRIZE you have to be a good sport. You can't be blocking and tackling others who are in your way.

You have to have a Chip 'n' Dale attitude: "No, you first, I insist." --- "No, no, by all means, you lead the way."

As for myself, if I could be a candidate for the Peace Prize, I'd be very mellow in public, but clawing like a tiger behind the scenes.

They'd be saying, "Mr. Kundalini, you have prevailed." I'd be in my study, swishing a snifter of cognac, saying, "Exxxxcelllent...."

Say that 5 times fast, "Swishing a snifter."

I understand there's a cash prize that goes with it. Which of course I wouldn't be interested in having.

If You Want To Lose 350 Followers A Day

1. Ask everyone to please quit following you. Tell them if they don't, you're going to annoy them to death.

2. Start the annoying even before they have a chance to quit. Tweet such things as "Come see my naughty profile," or let them know you have the secrets to getting rich quick.

3. For those seeking to be inspired, cuss out everyone's old favorites, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, and, of course, Mother Teresa.

4. Just type random words or meaningless phrases. Keep them short so it's obvious it's just worthless.

5. Describe your body parts in the lewdest terms and what you're doing with them.

6. Be prolific.

The Moss Of Imagination

I wish I could get the moss I had when I first got up today. My mind was running fast, flying over fields of thought. Very manic and fun.

The thing about thought. It has to do with your rest, your dreams, and whatever other place moods come from. At those times, bottle it!

By the time of lunch, then certainly after you have the food and that languor of digestion going on, you feel like everything's slowed down.

This is one reason I should be eating a light salad for lunch. Get that discipline.

I love a good crouton.

Vague Tweets

Someone at Twitter cited one of my tweets as a "vague tweet." I've only been on there three or four days, so I guess it's an honor -- being virtually followerless as I am -- for this Vague Tweets guy to cite one of mine as vague.

It was:

You might call me a group dynamologist and a grange dancologist. With an interest in sexual tension. And farmers' daughters.

I'd love to explain about this. I'm doing Twitter with my Grandma Slump persona. As vaguely defined as that persona is. I go through days wondering about it occasionally. The fact that no one else is wondering makes it my own concern.

Recently, from April to the end of July, I was "on hiatus," during which I went on and on about that. Now I'm casting about for another theme that will be easy enough to write about on a daily basis while bringing in some weird bits of humor. I try to take how I normally think and give it about five twists. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes not. But I keep tweaking it, since my funnier ideas come after I've hit the post button.

My big idea for the foreseeable future is a toughie. But I'm going to make it easier by not being entirely consistent. I don't really know how to do fiction in any kind of orderly way. So it's going to be a mixture of teaching about group dynamics and a secret, nefarious society that has their roots in the local grange. I'm picturing these characters as the ordinary folks who go to the grange, but they're very far gone as far as looking down their noses at other people and wanting to maintain strict group coherence.

Why and how all this is meant to exist in an actual human setting is probably going to be my downfall. But maybe it's a magical place like Brigadoon, only the very moral characters of this society are also rotten and evil to the core. I'd love to have easily-accessible farmers' daughters, but I've also defined most of them as informants and not really that interested in relations with outside entities. But there may be one or two. This is probably what will happen. I will find one or two who have moral issues with immorality and decide to be immoral in other ways. But how am I going to discern their intentions? That's a direction to go for sure.

On the other hand, I'm over 50 and the typical farmer's daughter who wears those hot farmer's daughter shorts we all love is going to be looking for someone younger. It could be, though, that with the high rate of informants among their possible beaus that they don't know where to turn. (I need to keep it clean, though, because I don't do blue material.)

Now, the grange people are very moral. But they also use obviously immoral means to root out those who have come among them who are not sincere and concerned with group coherence as they demand it should be. These means include orgies and all kinds of other apparent looseness. It's all done for their own moral ends, which would be immoral to the rest of us.

Where's the group dynamics angle come from? I'm interested in group dynamics even though I don't have any formal training in the subject. But still, I figure my theories and conclusions are just as good as anyone's. Just because I'm not parroting the normal academic line doesn't mean my conclusions are inferior. I feel like I need to take academic inbreeding to task anyway. They're always looking down their nose at us laymen, who could probably kick their flabby butts if it came to fisticuffs. In this case, I would aver, might makes right.

We were out to lunch the other day and I wrote the "Vague Tweet" while sitting at the table in a fancy restaurant. It gave me a thrill, like a bolt of electricity that started in one heel and went up to my knee, then from my knee to my [that area]. Then from [that area] up to the chest and so forth. Then it was repeated in the other leg. To make a long story short, I ended up with my shirt unbuttoned and was daubing my sweaty chest with the fancy cloth napkin soaked in my iced tea. [I'm doing my persona again, fell into it.]

But I want to give credit where credit is due. I couldn't think of the word that would become "dynamologist." I was asking, "What would be the word, a fake word, for someone who studies group dynamics?" Because I was thinking "dynamicist," which didn't look right. [I love all this self-referential BS, of which every word is true.] The woman I was with -- yes, I was with a woman -- suggested "dynamologist" and I said "That's perfect." Sending off my tweet, we both soaked our sweaty chests and sent for refills.

Now, of course I know that when the "Vague Tweets" guy or gal (but waiters call both men and women "guys," so I guess I can too) saw my tweet, he or she no doubt thought it was just some random crap that meant nothing. But it's not that vague if you know the back story! One thing about it, though, I don't believe I had the evil grangers in mind quite yet. Just the farmers' daughters.